Stuart Elliott: It Was a “Mad,” “Mad,” “Mad,” “Mad” World

At this point what does it matter what you say about quotMad Menquot By now the AMC drama series which concluded its run on Sunday has been put under more microscopes than all the frogs in high school biology As the finale neared the coverage in print and online built to a frenzy that aided and abetted by social media made the departure of quotMad Menquot loom like a mashup of the farewells for quotFriendsquot quotSeinfeldquot quotThe Fugitivequot quotCheersquot and of course quotMASHquotI39m certainly not complaining If you39re looking for someone to blow the whistle on quotMad Menquot mania to call for perspective or proportion look elsewhere After all in my final years as the advertising columnist for The New York Times quotMad Menquot gave me more grist for my mill than a thousand nay ten times ten thousand agencies put togetherThere was absolutely no way to foresee that when on April 21 2006 I visited Stage 9 of the Silvercup Studios in Long Island City to watch a scene being filmed for the hourlong pilot of quotMad Menquot The scene was by the way the one in which John Slattery as Roger Sterling describes a candidate for president in 1960 as quotyoung handsome beautiful wife Navy heroquot then delivers the switcheroo quotHonestly Don it shouldn39t be hard to convince America Dick Nixon is a winnerquotIt was one of the many delectable touches that made quotMad Menquot so special that by the end of season six the series reached November 1968 when indeed a phalanx of imagemakers who included Roger Ailes convinced America of just thatI was I recall thrilled about quotMad Menquot Not only was it going to be about advertising it was going to be about advertising in the 1960s And it was going to present advertising as something interesting and worth taking seriously rather than ridiculing it condemning it on ideological grounds or dismissing it as beneath contemptAs someone who not only writes about advertising but whose hobbies include nostalgia especially vintage ads it was as if after a bender worthy of an agency chief of the quotMad Menquot era I had passed out and dreamed up Matthew Weiner and his interest in Madison Avenue I39m thinking of bronzing my copy of the pilot script dated April 3 2006Advertising was quotthe sexiest job of the periodquot Weiner told me during an interview on Stage 9 on that day more than nine years ago He went on quotSome people think money is our national religion I think it39s selling and it39s beautiful and we do it better than anyonequotThose remarks were part of an article about quotMad Menquot and its prospects at AMC that I wrote for the Times which ran on May 30 2006 If AMC quotagrees to pick up 39Mad Men39quot I reported quotit would begin as a weekly series in 2007quot As they say the rest is history The green light came three months later followed by a sponsorship deal with Jack Daniel39s And the pilot I watched being filmed was shown as the series39 first episode on July 19 2007Advertising wasn39t very sexy then beset by problems with procurement and how to make money from digital media But quotMad Menquot has helped bring back some of its swagger which has been useful in recruiting the Millennial generation that agencies need to reach as they battle for talent with Silicon Valley and other centers of dotcommerce Annual events like Advertising Week raise the industry39s profile but quotMad Menquot has injected a meaningful measure of mojoThe American Association of Advertising Agencies 4A39s ought to take out ads thanking Weiner and AMC for their contributions to the business especially in getting people outside advertising to talk about advertising again After all has any other TV series ended its run not with the principal characters onscreen in the final moments but with a singing commercialStill for all that seven seasons of quotMad Menquot have accomplished for Madison Avenue there39s no one in advertising on the Time list of quotthe 100 Most Influential Peoplequot for 2015 And Ben Smith the influential editorinchief of BuzzFeed wrote in a recent email quotI don39t think advertising and marketing are particularly interesting topics in general quotMaybe the 4A39s could inveigle Weiner into producing a sequel quotBetter Call Joanquot anyoneThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecom management or associated bloggers

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Stuart Elliott: It Was a “Mad,” “Mad,” “Mad,” “Mad” World

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